Saving your tabs to Zotero when transferring computers

canadianjameson

Hi all,

Just a further thought. I'm about to head from my M.Sc lab to my home computer, and I realized that while I can save all of the references I have found... I cannot save "how I found them".

As we all know, finding "that perfect article" is a process through which many tabs and web pages are used. I have a habit of going back through the steps and branching out in a different direction after I've explored one reference path as far as possible. This is fine if you stay on one computer, but when you move around it can be problematic.

Is there any chance that a future version of Z would include the capability to "import recent tabs (and their sequential histories)". This way users could select / identify the tabs they wish saved, and Z could allow that set of tabs & histories to be opened on another computer - effectively allowing users to pick up exactly where they left off.

What say you fair research-facilitating gods?

adamsmith

I think that's something that should probably be addressed by a different Firefox extension - I'm not quite sure I understand you 100% - but look at extensions like Taboo and the like to see if these come closer to what you want.
Synchronizable browsing histories might be of interest to some researchers, but I don't see how it is integrated with anything Zotero is currently doing (in the technical sense - I understand that it facilitates research) so I don't think Zotero should be in the business of doing that.

canadianjameson

Right... I'm suggesting something that falls outside the realm of what Z is doing.

Gotcha :)

Thanks,


Jay

Bionatsci

Jay - if you have access to a networked location which you can access through the filesystem (or are willing to use a USB stick for transfer) the "session manager" add on with the same custom storage location on both computers (normally it puts saved sessions in your profile folder) should do more or less exactly what you requested.

I use it for research all the time (although only on the one computer) and it's great. It would drive me mad to manually retrace my steps through the 50 or so tabs I create whenever I do a literature search.

P.S. You might have found this already, but if you like retracing your steps through tabs have you tried the "tree style tabs" extension? This features automatic hierarchical organisation of tabs (session manager saves this hierarchy too!).

Zotero, tree style tabs and session manager are IMO the three essential add-ons for research in Firefox.

canadianjameson

Hi,

I hadn't seen the extension before, but thank you! It works well :)

Cheers,

Jay